<p>so I was researching information about the college and i came across a a youtube video of all things, discussing general info about the school. In this video it mentioned that UCLA "grades on a notoriously difficult curve". This was my first time even hearing about this. I assume students just do what they're assigned and they get graded on it. nothing too complicated.</p>
<p>I was wondering if anyone could elaborate more on this...How does this work exactly?
are there any UCLA people out there that can vouch for this claim? do you feel the pressure of this curve?</p>
<p>I have no experience with UCLA but what the students in the video seem to be saying is regardless of what percentage of the questions you get correct on an exam, a percentage of the students who got the highest scores get As, maybe 15% of the top scorers. A percentage of the next highest scorers get Bs, than a percentage gets Ds and a percentage of the people with the lowest scores, even if their scores were actually pretty good get Fs. This would seem to pit students against each other in a ferocious competition to obtain the limited number of As available and avoid the inevitable Fs. </p>
<p>I am not sure this really makes a lot of difference in the grades people get at most colleges. Usually when you give an examination in college it just happens that some students will get high scores and deserve their As and there will be students who will do poorly and earn their Fs. However, a selective school like UCLA probably does not admit many students who are not capable of doing college level work so it may be possible that a student could do college level work there and still fail if their classmates outperform them.</p>
<p>I have read that at MIT, a much more selective university than even UCLA, there is a very lenient curve, particularly for freshmen. MIT professors apparently give extremely difficult exams where the mean might be around 25% and if you get half the questions (50%) right on the exam right you get an A. It is said that MIT freshmen, nearly all of whom never got a grade lower than 90 on a test in high school, are very shaken when they get their first Calculus midterm back with a grade of 18%, a solid C.</p>